New Metric Album Inspired by ‘Blade Runner’!

Trip out on this: Toronto’s Metric will return on June 12 with their fifth album, Synthetica, the follow-up to their 2009 release Fantasies, and best/trippiest of all, the album is partially inspired by the 1982 sci-fi flick Blade Runner. Whaaaaaaaa!?!

Frontwoman Emily Haines says she came to the title Synthetica while comparing contemporary pop plasticity with Blade Runner’s Replicants, a group of genetically engineered robots that are visually indistinguishable from humans. Heavy.

"If you imagine a nightmarishly fake version of me as a pop star, that's her," Haines says. "And this record was about me saying, I'm going to give more to the music than ever, but there's no way I'm going to turn into someone like that."

According to a statement, the title track features Haines singing, "We're all the time confined to fit the mold / But I won't ever let them make a loser of my soul." So, there you have it: Metric meets Blade Runner.

Sessions for the new album were started immediately after Metric capped their exhaustive Fantasies tour in November 2010, with the quartet returning to their hometown Giant Studios and finishing up a year later at New York's Electric Lady Studios. Guitarist Jimmy Shaw produces and John O'Mahony (Coldplay, the Cribs) mixes.

The far less heady Shaw says Synthetica is "…the culmination of everything we've done. We've always had a sound in our heads that we hoped to realize. We finally heard it coming back out of the speakers this time."

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